A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

Relationships between Black and white people that extend far beyond the familiar template of “master-slave” dynamics are at the center of this historical account.

A white man hosts a wedding party for his Black servant and finds himself charged with a criminal offense; an overseer ends up dead after drinking with an enslaved man; two men—one poor and white, the other enslaved—team up to plot a murder.

A Terrible Intimacy recounts six criminal cases in one Virginia county in the years leading up to the Civil War. Witnesses of both races describe a startling variety of encounters between Black and white people that complicate the binary understanding of “master-slave” relations.

Contrary to common assumptions, nearly half of enslaved people in the South lived not on large plantations but on small properties. While cruelty was embedded in the system, enslavers and the enslaved often lived in close proximity—sometimes in households of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty people—sharing religious worship, folkways, labor, and complex domestic relationships. Enslaved people, slaveholders, overseers, and poor whites drank, worked, socialized, and even committed crimes together. Yet violence remained ever-present: whippings were routine, families were separated, and by 1861 most white men in Prince Edward County were prepared to fight to defend slavery.

These intertwined lives reveal that white Americans frequently recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they upheld a system that exploited and terrorized them. Offering new insight into the lived complexity of the Old South, A Terrible Intimacy deepens our understanding of one of the darkest chapters in American history.